With
Amazon’s introduction of the Kindle e-book reader last year,
the stalled movement towards digitized literature got a little
bump. Previous e-book hardware had never gained any real traction,
as the older devices were too bulky or just generally unsatisfying.

E-literature has always been a tough sell. Unlike music or
photography, where the migration to digital was natural and
seemingly inevitable, there’s just something about a book
that people don’t want to let go of. Part tactile, part romantic,
and part practical, the physical book’s appeal has stood down
several generations of plastic-shelled devices.

Is that changing now? I haven’t used a Kindle, but I’ve read
a number of glowing reports that the consumer experience is
a significant improvement over previous e-book readers. And
Sony just announced it’s rolling out its new Daily Reader
in December, which looks like it might be a contender. And
then there’s the rumored Apple tablet, maybe coming very soon,
which may or may not have e-book reading capabilities. Considering
Apple’s success with everything else it touches, and synergies
with the ever-popular iTunes store, the tablet could be the
game changer.

Obviously, one benefit of these things is the fact that you
can put 1,000 books into one little book-sized thingy. Another
is that all of these devices are hooked into wireless networks,
which means you can download books on the fly. This also opens
the door for subscription newspaper and magazine delivery,
and integration with the Web and social networks.

Right now, cost is a serious factor. The Kindle is around
$300, the Sony reader is reportedly gonna be around $400,
and the Apple tablet won’t come cheap. These devices all come
with free connectivity to wireless networks, but still, that’s
a chunk of change to commit to a technology with a history
of failing to deliver enduring customer satisfaction.

And then you have to buy the “books.” Amazon’s got best-sellers
going for $10 each, and one has to wonder if this price point
makes sense. Like with music MP3s, there’s no cost of producing
anything physical, no shipping, no warehouses. But to be sure,
charging $10 for an e-book where the hard-cover version is
$25 makes more sense than charging $10 to download an album
when you can buy the CD for $12.

Finally, there’s what you get and what you own when you “buy”
a book. Last month, Amazon found out that it had been selling
George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm pursuant
to a license from a publisher that apparently didn’t have
the rights to the books to begin with. In other words, it
was selling pirated copies of the books. So Amazon invoked
its “rights” in the fine print of its user agreements, utilized
its “digital rights management” technology, which basically
tethers the “books” it sells, and removed all of the copies
of the books it had sold consumers from the consumers’ Kindles.
Anybody who had bought these books suddenly didn’t have them
any more. At least one kid reported that his copy of 1984
disappeared while he was reading it. Amazon did credit everyone’s
account, but that really didn’t address the main point.

Which was, “Whaddya mean I don’t ‘own’ the book I just bought?”
Even more frightening was the fact that Amazon had hooks into
your reader. If Amazon could simply remove a book you “bought”
at will, what else could it do? Does it know what you’re reading
and when? Can it hear you, too? Does it know where you are
right now?

Obviously, the delicious irony that this happened with Orwell’s
1984 puts the episode into the “You just can’t make
this stuff up” category.

After a long week of public outcry, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos issued
a statement that this was a horrible mistake on Amazon’s part,
that he was outraged, and that it would never happen again.
It was the right response, but it doesn’t really fix the problem.
The debacle is grounded in the idea that publishers are demanding
that when you “buy” an e-book, you’re not really buying an
e-book; rather you’re licensing the right to look
at the e-book. And that license comes with conditions:
You can’t, for instance, edit the e-book; you can’t give the
file to a friend to read on their Kindle; you can’t transfer
the file to another device that you own. And, if you do the
wrong thing, or if the publisher just decides to, your e-book
can get removed from your Kindle. Just like that.

I don’t know how Bezos cranked the publishers to let him promise
he’d never allow the erasure of an e-book again; maybe Bezos
agreed, as a business decision, to be financially responsible
for whatever perceived financial fall-out the publishers “suffer”
now that they can’t recall their books. But it’s a cautionary
tale, and another example of the train wrecks that occur when
digital reality comes face to face with the fictions of old
imperial copyrights.

—Paul
Rapp

Paul
Rapp is an intellectual-property lawyer with offices in Albany
and Housatonic, Mass. He teaches art-and-entertainment law
at Albany Law School, and regularly appears as part of the
Copyright Forum on WAMC’s Vox Pop. Contact info can
be found at paulrapp.com. Comments about this article can
be posted at rapponthis.blogspot.com.